Novel
کلیدر
Not translated into English
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi · 1984
Synopsis
At the foot of the Kelidar mountain, in Khorasan, the Kalmishi, a nomadic Kurdish family, have lost their herds in the drought, and dry farming yields nothing. It all begins when the young Maral proudly leads her horse towards the town prison, where her father and her fiancé are held. Gol-Mohammad, the second son, already married, falls in love with her and marries her; quarrels between clans worsen, blood is shed, the gendarmes come, and Gol-Mohammad, helped by an itinerant cobbler of the Tudeh party, takes up arms against the big landowners.
Context
Begun in 1977, the novel appeared from 1978 to 1984 in ten books gathered in five volumes, nearly three thousand pages; the first three volumes, published in the years of the revolution, had sold twenty thousand copies before the whole was completed. The author started from real events and from a Gol-Mohammad who was talked about in the Sabzevar region during his childhood. Houshang Golshiri saw in it a retreat of the Persian novel towards the oral tale, while others hailed it as an event. Sigrid Lotfi published an abridged German translation of it in 1999; it also exists in Kurdish, in Balochi and in Arabic.
Who it is for
A very long novel in Persian, with a linear narrative. It helps to know that it exists neither in French nor in English, and that the language mixes the speech of Khorasan with classical prose.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the longest Persian novel and as one of the major works of modern Iranian prose; reprinted dozens of times.